Actor Dylan Neal shares the secret to his happy marriage

Actor Dylan Neal shared the secret to his long and happy married life with wife Becky Southwell and how the much in love couple has been managing their married life along with their professional career.
The Canadian actor, who is known for his portrayal of the character Dylan Shaw on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful has been married to his wife for almost two decades now. The busy couple, despite all the work and their hectic schedule has succeeded in keeping their marriage safe and sound unlike most of the celebrity couples in the show biz.
And Neal recently gave away the secret on how he and his better half have been together as a couple and proud parents of their children.
It is not as easy as it may seem to balance one’s professional life along with the family and personal life but Neal and Southwell have done it. How? Let us hear it from Neal himself.
Talking to urblife.com, the Fifty Shades of Grey star revealed how he and his beautiful wife manage their professional and family lives.
“We’ve been married 18, and together 23. I think you just do what you can do. Everyone approaches it differently I’m sure. Our life is particularly busy right now, and the fact that most of my projects if not all of them shoot in Vancouver or that area and my family is in Los Angeles. It means that it’s a lot of travel, a lot of back and forth when I’m doing Cedar Cove. For four or five months of the year, I travel home every weekend, sometimes a 36-hour trip home to remind the kids what dad looks like. Sometimes with the schedule I’m allowed to get four or even five days. It just depends on the schedule,” said Neal.
He further added that it was quite difficult to juggle their work and family life as they needed to travel constantly. He also said that he and Southwell have enough mutual understanding that helps the couple to stay put in their relationship.
“My wife is solo parenting while I’m away of course, so we have to hire a full-time nanny. It’s a juggling act, but it’s really no different from a working parent kind of family. You just figure out how it works. I think that the added struggle we have is that I happen to be away so much of the year.
“So I’m like a salesman, it’s no different than people who have to be on the road all the time because of work. We just do the best we can, and you figure it out on the way,” stated the actor.
While the couple has been juggling their two lives perfectly well, there is so much to learn from Neal and Southwell, isn’t there? And which is why the online magazine asked for some important advice on how to keep one’s marriage happy.
He said: “You’ve got to be marrying your best friend, I believe. You’ve got to know your core values and goals that you have in life, the ones you haven’t quite met, are in alignment so that there’s no big surprises six months or five years down the road.”
Neal said that marriage was not something easy to handle. He said that a couple must take a leap of faith in order to make marriage work.
“There are some really obvious things you want to have lined up, like if someone says they want to have a child and the other isn’t on board with that. There are so many different things you can advise people about going into a relationship, but at the end of the day, you don’t have all of the answers and you’re going to have to be ok with that. That’s part of the journey of life; you can’t have every box checked off moving forward.

“You do the best that you can. You take a leap of faith together, and know that marriage is probably really the hardest thing to do in life. I really believe that. It is an evolving, ongoing relationship that you’re embarking on with someone else. You’re going to have a lot of ups and downs, and as long as you realize you’re going to have to fight your way through it to come out through the other side, then you’re gonna be okay,” the Dawson’s Creek star said.
He further added: “It’s when people go into marriage thinking it’s going to be a bed of roses the whole time, and when in the realities of life come down on you, real problems come in. So I think if you go into a marriage realistically, with your eyes open and an open heart, then maybe you got a fighting chance. But it is the most difficult thing we all undertake in life, and that’s okay because all good things are worth extra work.”
Neal and his wife married back in 1996 and they have two children; a son and a daughter. The actor has appeared in several tv shows and a few movies as well. His net worth remains undisclosed.